Recent technological advances in the semiconductor industry have permitted dramatic increases in integrated circuit density and complexity, and equally dramatic decreases in power consumption and package sizes. Presently, single-die microprocessors are being manufactured with many millions of transistors, operating at speeds of hundreds of millions of instructions per second and being packaged in relatively small, air-cooled semiconductor device packages. The improvements in such devices have led to a dramatic increase in their use in a variety of applications. As the use of these devices has become more prevalent, the demand for reliable and affordable semiconductor devices has also increased. Accordingly, the need to manufacture such devices in an efficient and reliable manner has become increasingly important.
An important part in the design, construction, and manufacture of semiconductor devices concerns semiconductor memory and other circuitry used to store information. Conventional random access memory devices include a variety of circuits, such as SRAM and DRAM circuits. The construction and formation of such memory circuitry typically involves forming at least one storage element and circuitry designed to access the stored information. DRAM is very common due to its high density (e.g., high density has benefits including low price), with DRAM cell size being typically between 6 F2 and 8 F2, where F is the minimum feature size. However, with typical DRAM access times of approximately 50 nSec, DRAM is relatively slow compared to typical microprocessor speeds and requires refresh. SRAM is another common semiconductor memory that is much faster than DRAM and, in some instances, is of an order of magnitude faster than DRAM. Also, unlike DRAM, SRAM does not require refresh. SRAM cells are typically constructed using 4 transistors and 2 resistors or 6 transistors, which result in much lower density and is typically between about 60 F2 and 100 F2.
Various SRAM cell designs based on a NDR (Negative Differential Resistance) construction have been introduced, ranging from a simple bipolar transistor to complicated quantum-effect devices. These cell designs usually consist of at least two active elements, including an NDR device. In view of size considerations, the construction of the NDR device is important to the overall performance of this type of SRAM cell. One advantage of the NDR-based cell is the potential of having a cell area smaller than four-transistor and six-transistor SRAM cells because of the smaller number of active devices and interconnections.
Conventional NDR-based SRAM cells, however, have many problems that have prohibited their use in commercial SRAM products. These problems include, among others: high standby power consumption due to the large current needed in one or both of the stable states of the cell; excessively high or excessively low voltage levels needed for cell operation; stable states that are too sensitive to manufacturing variations and provide poor noise-margins; limitations in access speed due to slow switching from one state to the other; limitations in operability due to temperature, noise, voltage and/or light stability; and manufacturability and yield issues due to complicated fabrication processing.
A thin capacitively-coupled thyristor-type NDR device can be effective in overcoming many previously unresolved problems for thyristor-based applications. An important consideration in the design of the thin capacitively-coupled thyristor device involves designing the body of the thyristor sufficiently thin, so that capacitive coupling between a control port and a thyristor base region can substantially modulate the potential of the base region. For memory-cell applications, another important consideration in semiconductor device design, including those employing thin capacitively-coupled thyristor-type devices, includes forming devices in a very dense array.
In order to achieve a dense array of thyristor devices, it is sometimes desirable to form trenches having a very high aspect ratio (the ratio of height-to-width of the opening of the trench). However, commonly used insulative materials are difficult to implement when filling trenches having an aspect ratio of greater than 2:1. For instance, many insulative materials tend to fill in an upper cross-section of a trench before lower portions of the trench are filled, which can result in voids in the insulative material near the trench bottom. In addition, when isolating adjacent circuitry, it is sometimes difficult to use a single trench for isolating multiple devices, such as a pass gate and a thyristor device. For example, in memory arrays, it is difficult to isolate word lines in adjacent memory cells. Furthermore, when implementing adjacent trenches having varied depths, tapering effects can cause an upper portion of a trench to be wider than a lower portion thereof. Such tapering can result in undesirable substrate material between the two trenches, which can allow current leakage from circuit devices formed in and/or adjacent to the trenches.
These and other design considerations have presented challenges to implement such a thin capacitively-coupled thyristor in bulk substrate applications, and in particular to highly-dense applications.